Business blogging is the MySpace marketing campaign for the 21st century. Everybody and their brother is running a blog to go with their business. That blog provides a free channel directly to their readers, an opportunity to get out and have a little fun with their advertising (because really, how often does the company CEO get to go out and just talk to their customers?) and a never-ending supply of fresh content for their website.
Don't forget to mind your manners when you're traveling the Blogosphere.
The rush in business blogging has done something else, too. It’s offered today’s businesses a chance to expand their personal and professional networks by commenting on other businesses’ blogs. Suddenly you have a whole community of people with thoughts and opinions to offer on the topic du jour, an endless number of people willing and able to answer your questions, a warm, willing, receptive audience for your thoughts…and oh, yeah, a great place to get backlinks and find a toasty pool of sales leads for your next product.
You’ll notice two drastically different schools of thought in the list above. There are those that consider blogs to be a community tool for conversation, and there are those that look at a blog as a means to an end. The first group is made up of the kind of blog commentator every business blogging group wants on their website. They’re intelligent. They’re articulate. They’re anxious to get involved. They have something to contribute. They help transform an ordinary blog into a community, which is exactly what a good blog should be.
Then there’s the second group, the kind that inspires blog administrators like me to kick out blogs about business blogging because they completely ruin the purpose of trying to build a community through your blog. I’m not saying every person that comments on a blog in the interest of building their business is doing it wrong, but it’s this group that gave rise to the practice of blog SPAM and generic blog comments that don’t do anything but take up space and make admins spend precious seconds remembering how to push “Delete”.
Blog SPAM might sound like a good idea-after all, it is a quick, automated way to build your backlinks. The problem is, web administrators are rapidly realizing that it’s quality, not quantity, that matters in a blog. Take this blog, for example. Just this morning I deleted not one, not two, but five pieces of blog SPAM from someone trying to sell hair products on the web. On a marketing blog? That has nothing to do with hair? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s a fair number of people out there reading this that have threatened to yank their hair out at some point or another that would benefit from a hair regrowth formula, but we shouldn’t be viewed as your primary target audience.
Nor are web administrators going to continue to allow you to post pointless backlinks attached to comments you didn’t even take the time to write.
My personal rant aside, business blogging is made up of a community of businesses and should be handled with the same finesse you would use if you were at a cocktail party with Fortune 500 CEOs that couldn’t care less about your business when you first walk in the door. Manners. Timing. Social skills. A genuine desire to integrate yourself into the pre-existing social framework. Master those skills, and business blogging will finally begin to work for you.